We had a small shake up today as I was sitting in our winemaker’s second story office in Yountville. Yep, we looked up at each other stupidly, mouths ajar — such a useful reaction!!
However, the happy result is that I discovered this awesome website for the USGS! It had the quake posted within minutes of the event. Plus it has maps and all kinds of geeky fun (including a “Did You Feel It?” submit your story page).
They may be on our dirty words list, but recent articles on “fission”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html and “cold fusion”:http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/sep04/0904nfus.html might signal a new age for nuclear power. Most interesting to me is the idea of a “pebble bed reactor”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor or “cold fusion bottle”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion providing megawatts of power to Mars missions and other weight-conscious applications without having to compromise on environmental security.
Having been burned by the original hype about both “Our Bold Atomic Future”:http://www.globalspin.com/mt/archives/000356.html and cold fusion, I’ll admit I’m skeptical. It’s now the responsibility of nuclear proponents to show that these technologies are safer and more effective than “existing”:http://www.greasecar.com/ “alternative”:http://www.cat.org.uk/index.tmpl?refer=index&init=1 “energy”:http://www.greenmountain.com/ “sources”:http://www.realgoods.com/. Good luck to them.
Some of you know of my interest in Susan McCarthy’s, Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Larn to Live in the Wild (that link is to a great blog entry about one of her book signings in San Diego). McCarthy worries that humans will never be able to teach captive-raised animals natural behaviors. Well, according to the BBC, San Diego native Hua Mei got pregnant and gave birth to twins after watching panda sex on-screen. I wonder if animals can actually learn things this way?
Apparently “chimps are subject to contagious yawning”:http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996182 just like humans.
_The team played videos of chimps either yawning or exhibiting other open-mouth behaviours such as grinning to six adult chimps and three infants at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University in Japan._
_…They argue that their figure of 33 per cent of adults showing contagious yawning compares well with humans since the chimps do not understand the purpose of the trial._
_…”Our data suggest that contagious yawning is a by-product of the ability to conceive of yourself and to use your experience to make inferences about comparable experiences and mental states in others,” Gallup told New Scientist._
Deana sent this “story from Yahoo! News”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1894&e=1&u=/ap/20040610/ap_on_sc/dog_language:
_German researchers have found a border collie named Rico who understands more than 200 words and can learn new ones as quickly as many children._
_…The researchers found that Rico knows the names of dozens of play toys and can find the one called for by his owner._
_…The border collie, a breed known primarily for its herding ability, was able to go to the room with the toys and, seven times out of 10, bring back the one he had not seen before._
_…”Apparently he was able to link the novel word to the novel item based on exclusion learning, either because he knew that the familiar items already had names or because they were not novel,” said the researchers._